I have a question that may or may not mark me as an idiot. I was one of those poor souls who once submitted a book to PublishAmerica. It did nothing of course, which probably had as much to do with my poor marketing skills or theirs.
The point is, its out there on the Net so its bound to turn up in any discussion on any future website of mine. Should I ignore that book, pretend it never existed? Or fess up now, admit my mistake now & get it out of the way? Thank you.

It seems you attribute the failure to poor marketing rather than the book itself being poor-so why would you ignore it? Choosing the wrong publisher might make the book hard to find but if it's good then recommend it-people will seek it out. If it's bad then acknowledge that. Either rewrite & republish it or list it but advise people to ignore it.

If you're ashamed of it, then you might be wise not to mention it to your friends, co-workers, union, church, wife, children, New Jersey, MobileRead, bank, school, the community in which you live, credit union, state, and finally your country.

If on the other hand you are proud of it, then you should only mention it if someone else mentions it first and liked it. If they didn't like it, quickly walk away so that you will not be further embarrassed.

You and over 10,000 others. Most authors do not start out as business people - unfortunate deals get made all the time, and this falls into that category. It happens. No one is perfect. PA presented themselves as something resembling a trad publisher in terms of what they claimed to offer. It took some time before the truth came to light.

Worrying overly much about your previous association with PA can leave a negative impression. I wouldn't address it unless it comes up. My advice, if it does come up, would be to chalk it up as "seemed like a good idea at the time", and don't make excuses. Simply state that, at the time, publishing outside of traditional routes was much harder to navigate and you're glad that authors have many more options available to them today.

PA presented themselves as something resembling a trad pub on the face - providing small advances, claiming to have an intense review process for acceptance, and also claiming to offer full editorial and marketing services and in-store distribution just like trad pub. This was not quite accurate.

The best descriptions I've seen of PA hover around "truly loathsome." They market themselves to authors as a "traditional" publisher, a term they are trying to equate to a commercial publisher, but have a very different publishing model. Their basic business model is to lock the writer into a long-term deal and then sell them their own books at higher than average prices for the author to presumably resell. Many consider them a scam.

I wouldn't call attention to a PA book, but I wouldn't bother to market it until you can recover the rights.

I've not heard of Publish America, but I wouldn't worry overly about having put a book out through them. Before I started self-publishing, I hadn't heard of Author Solutions and all their aliases either. Even now that I do know about them, seeing their name on a book listing doesn't put me off buying the book, it just makes me feel slightly sad that the author probably got a bad deal

I wouldn't mention it. If you're asked about it, be honest - you made a mistake. It looked like a good deal, and you only found out the truth when it was too late.